Thank you!

We knew that you guys would really dig open source but we didn’t expect such a positive response. Within a single week, our open source blog post got more than 200k views! And even on GitHub, which seems to be the place for open source these days, .NET Core jumped at the top of the trending GitHub repositories for last week.

We also have seen a tremendous activity in our social channels, specifically Twitter, blog comments and our Facebook site. I’ve seen very few negative comments – the overwhelming majority of the feedback was congratulations and genuine excitement.

Some of the contributions were requests for API additions, such as async overloads for XDocument. We’re still figuring out the process for reviewing public API additions. As you know, we still very much care about interoperability between .NET Framework and .NET Core. Thus, we need to be mindful about the fact that we may need to port API additions back to the .NET Framework – which we know isn’t exactly cheap or easy. However, at the same time we don’t want to slow down .NET Core too much. After all, we’ve created this new stack so that we can release more often. So we need to strike a good balance here.

Microsoft GitHub presence

In case you haven’t you should check the Microsoft GitHub landing page:

We’re entertaining the idea of integrating charts like the one above into this site so that you can get a live view. What do you think?

What’s next?

We’re currently focusing on a few key areas:

Contribution processes. We’ve just finished setting up a public CI server on AppVeyor. We’ve also started a wiki that contains developer information. The next steps include a public roadmap and more specific information around how we review your pull requests.

More libraries. We’re heads down extracting the libraries from our internal engineering system so that we can put it on GitHub.

Cross-platform. We’re engaging with Miguel and the Mono community to take our stack cross-plat. This is currently blocked by not having enough libraries out there but it’s coming soon.

Runtime. Some of you might be eager to read the GC or the JIT code. You probably have to wait until early next year.

Please don’t hesitate to give us feedback. My team is still learning on how to play in an open source world so we’re heavily depending on you, our community, to tell us whether we’re heading in the right direction or not.

"We’re entertaining the idea of integrating charts like the one above into this site so that you can get a live view. What do you think?" Nah, focus that effort on those open pull requests, have those been assigned for review?

@Jose Fajardo: Open Source FULL .NET Framework as well … let it thrive in the OPEN too !!

We've released a subset under the MIT license on github.com/…/referencesource. The challenge is that we can't take pull requests on the .NET Framework — it's fairly expensive to update it ourselves because it ships with Windows and runs 1.5 billion machines.

@Steve: Nah, focus that effort on those open pull requests

Fair point. The developers on the .NET Core team are focused on exactly that. However, the web site is owned by another team. So no need to fear reduced resources for pull requests 🙂

By the way, the ones that haven't made it in yet all have a discussion.

I'm very happy that Microsoft invest a lot in .NET. I'm very excited about these news!

I'm a big fun of .NET and I have nine questions, hope that I will get answer each of them …

1.) What is the relation between .NET Core and .NET Native?

2.) Is it true that also .NET Core and also .NET Native not require any verson of the .NET Framework to run?

3.) What is the future of .NET Framework after 4.6?

4.) Will there be .NET Framework 5 in the future or .NET framework 4.x (x >=6) will be the last version and .NET Core will be the mainline?

You said that "we chose an evolutionary approach for versioning .NET Core, which is why it is version 5, the next whole number after 4.6, the latest version of the .NET Framework."

5.) Which verison of the .NET (framework) will be included in Windows 10?

6.) You said that the client side of WCF will be included in .NET Core. What about the server side of WCF? I mean .NET Core will be a Server side technology if I understand correctly …

7.) Will there be Portable library support for .NET Core?

8.) A summary description (blog spot or msdn article) would has be nice to clear the different subsets of the .NET also including the endded/offline paths like Silverlight.

I mean currently there are a lot of subset:

.NET Framework

.NET Core

.NET Native

WinRT (Windows Runtime)

Silverlight (4/5)

.NET for Windows Store (8, 8.1) apps

.NET for Windows Phone Xaml apps

Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight apps

Windows Phone 8 Silverlight apps

Windows Phone 7.5 Silverlight apps

WPF

9.) Why .NET Framework 4.6 again an in-place update? You have been created a great solution namely side-by-side installation of the .NET framework. Why don't you created the .NET framework 4.6 with side-by-side installation, instead of causing compatibility issues with current apps using .NET 4.0, 4.5 or 4.5.x?

I think nowdays there is enough place on the disk for storing each of the framework. Also in the .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 times you used this great solution.

Thank you for this initiative. It can be a game changer for me in terms of building for other platforms using my ~10 years of .NET development experience. I think it's a smart move, not to have people develop for other platforms than Windows, but having people develop for more platforms than Windows. It's really making .NET so much more useful especially in this day and age.

Can you elaborate more on the relationship between the full .NET Framework and .NET Core?

I basically want to understand how it will work when you have a solution that mixes current and legacy technologies. For example, I have a major application that uses both some "legacy" tech (WPF, Windows Services, etc.), and current-tech (ASP.NET MVC). I think it boils down to three specific questions.

1) If I want to move current-tech projects (e.g. MVC apps) forward to .NET Core but still share as much code in common projects as possible with legacy-tech projects (e.g. WPF), what options are available? PCLs? Or, is the full .NET framework a strict superset of Core so I can just target Core with all my shared projects?

2) If WPF isn't available on .NET Core, is there a long-term replacement that is? E.g. can store apps sit on .NET Core? What about other things like console apps, Windows Services, etc.?

3) Over time, how much will the classic framework and .NET Core diverge? E.g. if a new method is added to one, will it be added to both? Will bug fixes be ported between the two? Or is does the full framework just directly build on Core?

There will be a portable library subset which can use both .NET Framework and .NET Core. They don't want to introduce API incompatibilities between the two, or at least not ones they can't backport, so I think we can assume that Core will be treated nearly as a subset of the full Framework.

@Cory Nelson — That makes sense, I figured that's how it would be set up.

I sincerely hope this whole fragmented situation is just a stepping stone to some sort of more consolidated long-term state, where the full framework literally uses .NET Core, and just adds extra Windows-specific assemblies (e.g. WPF, Winforms, etc.).

I'm sure this would involve some breaking changes to the full framework, but in the long run I can only imagine Core will diverge significantly from where it is today; just laying the extra assemblies on top of Core and taking a one-time backwards compatibility hit seems preferable to maintaining two separate and increasingly divergent things. But that's just me.

Not directly related to the post but there are too many names and version numbers being floated around (.Net Core 5, ASP.NET 5, .Net Framework 4.6, .Net 2015, .Net Native, OWIN, MVC 6) in the last two years.

It is hard to wrap our heads around what's what and how it relates to the older .Net. Can someone from Microsoft please create a diagram/webpage logically classifying all these assets, complete with a timeline representing older version of the products as well?

Lists a repository named corefx. 'FX' is short for 'effects', sort of like 'JavaFX', right? Its description is "foundational libraries that make up development stack". I understand libraries, those are .dlls. But a development stack is much more than that. It must include a runtime and a compiler, otherwise it's only "foundational libraries". It Github readme tells me it contains not enough class libraries to build any application with. Where is system, or mscorlib, or system.core? Finally links to the '.NET home repository', I'll get back to that later, but for now, think about what 'home' means for .NET. Is it a website, like MSDN? If this is 'corefx' and 'makes up the development stack', then what is '.NET home'?

Further lists a repository named buildtools. This project does not explain if these tools are needed to build the corefx project, or to build my own projects. It seems I can ignore them if I'm not interested in contributing to .NET itself, right? Or is this like MSBuild? MSBuild is a buildtool. Is it (going to be) open source? Is this it?

Further lists the home repository. Hey, I rember just reading about this, 'the .NET home repository' was mentioned in the readme of the corefx project, right? Except that readme links to Microsoft/dotnet, so that's not the same as dotnet/home. Hmm, I must keep the Microsoft/dotnet in mind, I'll revisit it later.

For now, let's look at the last repository: core. Wait, scroll up, there's a corefx repository. What is this the core of then? Well, its description says it's the 'home repository for .NET Core'. So is that different than the repository named home that is listed right above it? And also different from the Microsoft/dotnet repository, which has been referred to as the '.NET home repository'?

Conclusion: I have looked at 5 repositories, and am now seriously confused…

I haven't even touched on github.com/Microsoft, where there is a dotnet repository, or aspnet/home, yet another 'home' repository (the whole aspnet account is even more of a mess).

What happened? MSDN used to be very structured and clear, and now it's just a data dump, with what seems like multiple team throwing incomplete stuff against the wall under confusing names without coordination.

I hope you can move some more mountains to make sure there's actually a coherent story and that developers will 'fall into the pit of success' rather than have to 'stumble through the forest' when it comes to finding (re)sources online.

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